


like sea glass and seam rippers

by freudiancascade



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen, Stolen Century Spoilers
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-10-09
Updated: 2017-10-09
Packaged: 2019-01-15 10:49:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,061
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12319518
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/freudiancascade/pseuds/freudiancascade
Summary: After the Relic War, some scars could never be wiped away. You just had to look at them sideways and they jumped back out, plain as day.(In which Taako remembers and goes on a quest, Lucretia needs a hug and a nap -- and isn't likely to get either any time soon -- and Lup is justifiably angry)





	like sea glass and seam rippers

**Author's Note:**

> An AU that contains Stolen Century spoilers! 
> 
> Also includes feelings about twins, canon-typical coarse language, and Lucretia needing a damn break.

_Maybe the only thing we can all agree on is that nobody meant for this to happen._

_Sure, mistakes were made. Oh boy, were mistakes ever fucking made. Maybe you didn't mean for it to go this far, but hey, maybe you meant to go farther. Maybe if you had gone farther, we'd be having a different talk right now. That'd be nice, wouldn't it?_

_Okay, look, let's try again: have you ever wanted to be unmade completely? Not just casually wished for it, but actually wanted it done? All the damage you've caused, erased. All the mistakes, gone. And anybody who would have missed you? The sum and arc of your experiences, your loves, every single thing you've ever been proud of and every secret you've ever tried to hide, suddenly moot? Suddenly null? Suddenly void? Packed up in a box and shipped back to sender unopened? To have a seam ripper taken to the shape of your life, plucking the outlines away?_

_Yeah, of course you haven’t. Because it’s awful._

_And I didn’t want that either, asshole._

_I guess the only saving grace is that you didn’t quite get your way. But, then again, nobody ever really does._

* * *

Lucretia's boots crunched against the black glass, shards of it crumbling to brittle dust beneath her thick heels. She pushed a hand back through her hair and surveyed the circle, a sick thud-thud-thud hammering an anxious drumbeat through her chest and down into her gut as she leaned against her staff to catch her breath. 

It never did get any easier, this. But she knew she had to keep looking for her family, all of them. Making the rounds every month was the least she could do. The memories were gone but the scars on the world remained, and maybe someday she’d finally have a stroke of luck.

Across the circle, movement. Lucretia's breath caught, thinking she’d found her at last— but no, the figure moved, and it was him. A dark cloak, patched and frayed; a pointed hat, at a jaunty angle; piercing eyes set in a sharp face, long hair bound up in a careless braid, wisps trailing free around his form. He looked tired and fraught, but tense; she could peg that much off him, even from a distance, even across the seas of memory and time.

Taako lifted a hand in a gesture. Calling her over, feigned carelessness, even as his eyes burned with heat and accusation. Everything the same, everything so far from certain.

Lucretia turned away, a rare moment of uncertainty sweeping through her. She knew immediately why he was here even if he, himself, did not. Knew with her whole being what he'd lost, who he’d lost, and so it wasn’t a surprise at all that he was searching. 

The universe is big but this world is small, and she stopped believing in coincidence so very long ago.

* * *

Months ago, here’s how it began.

Taako was sleeping alone and like a cat, curled with his back pressed up to the rough wooden slats of the wagon's corner and his head on a pile of worn clothing, because everybody on this fucking caravan was apparently a savage with no sense of keeping their own wardrobe distinct from anybody else's, not like it mattered much when the road wore all the fabric to around the same shade of brown, sure, yeah, whatever. Didn't matter, he wouldn't be staying with these clowns for too long. Just get to the next town and then split, rinse, repeat, and maybe somewhere along the bumps and scrapes of the wheels over the uneven path he could stop being recognized as the idiot wizard who's TV show had -- well, maybe it'd be nice, living an anonymous life like the common elf for a little bit. Maybe it'd be a nightmare. Probably a nightmare. Definitely a nightmare, who was he kidding, he couldn't lie to himself for even a second about that, he was meant for greater things and everybody knew it, especially him. Which meant he was too glamorous to go to prison, which meant he didn't have much choice in the matter. For now.

So he was sleeping alone and like a cat, curled around himself, but there was something strange about the shape his body formed, and in a half-awake daze he could have sworn like he was curled up like trying to protect somebody else from the bumps of the wheels as they caught each divot in the dirt.

_Where is she_?

The thought was blinding, shooting down from his brain to his spine and out through every limb, and he was on his feet before he fully realized he'd woken up, hat askew on his head and a chunk of sleep-mussed hair caught in his mouth as he gasped for breath. She was right there, so clear and solid and real, laughing in his aunt's kitchen and prodding the stew with a pointer finger, sitting cross-legged on the ground with sewing scissors snipping a pair of pants into a skirt, and then reworking that skirt into a top to show off the tan she'd gotten on her shoulders that summer they stayed with their second-uncle twice removed by that lake ringed with stones as green and smooth as seaglass, and she was --

\-- she was his sister, _fuck_ , of course she was, he remembered her so clearly, but _where was she now_?

He couldn't remember. Tried thinking back. She was with him, she was there, as close as a second skin and then — and then he hit a wall of solid static that jolted through him like an electric shock, spun through his brain and tasted like metal and magic. She was there and then she was not, and maybe he was an idiot wizard but he wasn't completely dense, somebody must have _done_ this.  Lup was gone. Somebody had taken her, somehow. From him, of all people! 

And  _shit fuck shit fuck shit_ what if she was hurt, or worse, or -- no, it was Lup, she had to be okay, but if she was okay, then _where was she_? 

Somebody had to know where she'd gone. Somebody must have _done_ this.

Taako's heart thudded loudly in his chest and he forced himself to sit back down slowly, deliberately, as though he was being watched. As though this, too, was a performance. Made himself loose-limbed and gentle, curling back into a ball on the floor. Like a cat, relaxing his bones and curving his spine.

He'd find them and make them pay, sure, but not tonight. They'd reach town in the morning, he'd slip away then, and...and...

Fuck, was this what a quest felt like? 

* * *

_Do you get it yet?_

_You can only take away so much._

_Maybe you can erase events, take the troubled lines of memory and iron them flat, sure. From a distance, everything might look just fine. The fabric sits likes it's supposed to on the form, pinned up and pleated just how you want._

_But babe, get close enough, and there’s always going to be seams._

* * *

Turns out, there was a lot of that going around. At first Taako thought he knew where to begin looking. His logic, in all fairness, was simple: He was a badass wizard, Lup was a badass wizard, and anybody who would hide something like that from him would probably have made one hell of a mess in the process.

But it wasn’t nearly that simple. Once he started looking for people and places where things had gone missing or changed with no memory of why, he realized he’d opened one hell of a rabbit hole. The whole damn world was full of them. Everywhere he looked he found bad things -- missing people, broken villages, kingdoms in utter fucking disarray, and nobody had the faintest idea how they’d gotten that way. 

It was like looking through a stereogram, you just had to squint sideways and then the differences between how things were and how they should have been started jumping out plain as day.

It was when he started actively asking questions that things usually got wild. Blank gazes. Defensive shrugs. Sometimes, bursts of rage. He got chased out of a tavern once by a woman wielding a chicken like it was a weapon, but given that he pocketed the keys hanging by the door on his way out, he figured that was fair enough. Broke into the woman’s house later, found a sheaf of papers bound up like letters in a place of honour on the desk, the parchment travel-worn and frayed, only the letters themselves were blank. 

There was stuff like that all over the damn place, once you started knowing where to look.

* * *

So he started checking into places instead. At least landscapes weren’t likely to bite back.

Peppermint is a fucking vicious plant. Chokes out everything else around it, spreads like a damn weed. It took two days of trekking through the jungle before he found the remains of the village of Armos, slick pink structures melted and hollowed out from the rain, candy spreading into the soil and settling on top of it like a pitted fungus. And peppermint weeds spread out across the island, blowing sweet scents into the wind. 

He crouched down and pressed a finger to the earth, shivering a little despite himself. Bad vibes, places like this always had bad vibes coming out the ass, he wasn’t an elf who spooked easily but this was some next-level crazy shit. He was a transmutation wizard, for all the god’s sakes, and something like this was horrifyingly beyond his scope. 

Taako stood up again, frowning. He wasn’t sure what he expected to find here, anyways. Maybe that’s all this feeling was, just more disappointment. 

And then the small human fell out of the tree above Taako’s head and nearly landed on him. 

Taako jumped back rather than catch, letting the child fall flat on his back in the marshy ground. Drew his wand and held it level as the kid scrambled back up. 

The child was a well-dressed boy, a feather in his cap, lanyard around his neck, and shiny loafers splattered with mud and strings of melted candy. “Hello sir,” he said, chipper despite his fall, “Are you looking for somebody here?"

Taako wasn’t impressed. "Get off my fucking turf, finding this missing person is my brand."

The boy pulled himself back to his loafer-clad feet. Evidently unharmed, he bobbed on the balls of his toes and stared up at the wizard unperturbed, small hand closed tightly around the shiny gold badge at the end of his lanyard. "Uh, actually? My name is Angus McDonald, I'm the world's best detective, and you’ve been looking at things that I’m interested in. So, I've got some questions I've been wanting to ask you for a very long --"

"Yeah, whatever. You're playing dress-up like the adults, I'm sure some folks think it's very cute, I don't have time for this. Get out of my way or I’ll blast you into next week, big brown eyes or not."

Angus furrowed his brow, shoving a thick pair of glasses down onto his nose. “No, no, I think you’re gonna wanna know what I know.”

Taako nearly spat back another retort, but thought abruptly of Lup and changed his mind. “Fine, fine. You start talking, little man, and we’ll see about that.”

 

* * *

_The summer my brother and I stayed in a small house by a lake ringed with sea-glass, I turned a pair of pants into a skirt, and then again into a top. It looked good — looked really damn good, if I’m being completely honest. Every transformation just made it even better and I lived in that shirt, wore it nearly every day over the course of that summer we lived by the lake, honing our spells to fish for our lunches and sleeping on the beach while the waves rushed in and out and in again._

_But the truth isn’t at all like that, and neither are people’s hearts. You can’t change them, just because they’d fit you better if they were shaped a different way._

_(And I can’t believe you even need to be told that, after all this time. Sometimes it feels like I didn’t ever really know you at all.)_

**Author's Note:**

> Lots of thanks and love to @intrikate88 for instigating this one, and reading the drafts.


End file.
